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frequently asked questions

How do tags work on MetaFilter?

Tags are a way of adding keywords to your posts as a way of making it easier to find and organize posts.

Tags can be added by the original poster either at the time of posting or later. Tags can also be added or removed by the site admins. Mutual contacts can add tags to each others' posts. Tags do not cross over from one part of the site to the other.

Tags can only include certain ASCII characters: English letters, numbers, and the following five punctuation marks _ ' \ - ! (underscore, apostrophe, backslash, hyphen, exclamation point). Tags cannot include accented letters or other special characters.

You can view pages tagged with specific words either by clicking on a tag, or going to a tag URL, for example:

http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/heavymetal
http://www.metafilter.com/tags/heavymetal

The 150 most popular tags are linked on these pages (MeFi, Ask MeFi). The larger a word appears on that page, the more times it has been used to tag a thread.

Tags also have individual RSS feeds, linked from the tag page. Tags are not case sensitive. Plural tags do not combine with their singular counterparts. Notable tags in MeFi include

http://www.metafilter.com/tags/obit
http://www.metafilter.com/tags/batshitinsane

Tags can be combined using the plus sign like this

http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/Japan+tokyo

Tags can be combined with usernames as well. So to see "all posts tagged with obit by user 292" you use this URL

http://www.metafilter.com/tags/obit/292

AskMe also has categories which can be used with tags for more specific searching.

Note: when a post is removed, the tags for that post are not removed from the index. This can sometimes cause discrepancies between the number of posts that are claimed to exist having a certain tag, and those that actually show up in a list of posts with that tag (example).